It is fearfully late
- or early - I seem to have been writing all. night - and I will
explain the matter in the fewest words. I promised Mr. Raffles
that I would write to you, Harry, and see you if I could. Well,
I did write, and I did mean to see you, but I never had an answer
to what I wrote. It was only one line, and I have long known you
never received it. I could not bring myself to write more, and
even those few words were merely slipped into one of the books
which you had given me. Years afterward these books, with my name
in them, must have been found in your rooms; at any rate they were
returned to me by somebody; and you could never have opened them,
for there was my line where I had left it. Of course you had never
seen it, and that was all. my fault. But it was too late to write
again. Mr. Raffles was supposed to have been drowned, and
everything was known about you both. But I still kept my own
independent knowledge to myself; to this day, no one else knows
that you were one of the two in Palace Gardens; and I still blame
myself more than you may think for nearly everything that has
happened since.
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